The Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 | Page 2

between science and theology. We wish to review the posture and temper of the parties; and particularly to refer to the tone and spirit of the religious press and the pulpit, respecting the alleged discoveries and claims of science, and their bearing upon the religious opinion of the time.
Moreover, in passing, the present writer begs permission to say that he speaks from the orthodox side of this question; he hails from the orthodox camp; he wears the clerical vesture of the Scottish worthies; and is affiliated theologically with Knox and Chalmers, with Edwards and Alexander, with the New York Observer and the Princeton Review. This much we beg to say, that what follows in these pages may be fully understood.
No one who has been attending to the subject with any degree of interest can have failed to observe that science, in her investigations upon the grand and momentous themes which have absorbed her attention in these latter years, has exhibited, and does still exhibit, a steady and well-defined purpose, and has pursued it with a singularly calm, sober, unimpassioned, yet resolute temper. Its posture is firm, steady, self-poised, conscious of rectitude, and anticipative of veritable and valuable results. Its spirit, though eager, is quiet; though enthusiastic, is cautious; though ardent, is sceptical; though flushed with success, is trained to the discipline of disappointment. Its object is to interrogate nature. It stands at the shrine and awaits the response of the oracle. It would fain interpret and make intelligible the wondrous hieroglyphics of this universe, and specially the mystic characters traced by the long-revolving ages upon the stony tablets of this planet Earth. It has in the first instance no creed to support, no dogmas to verify, no meaning to foist upon nature; its sole and single query is, What does nature teach? What is fact? What is truth? What has occurred in the past annals of this planet? What is the actual and true history of its bygone ages, and of the dwellers therein? These are its questions, addressed to nature by such methods as experience has taught will reach her ear, and it does not hesitate to take nature's answer. It does not shrink, and quake, and grow pale lest the response should overturn some ancient notion. It does not dread to hear the response, lest morals or religion should be thereby imperilled. It boldly and resolutely takes the teaching of nature, whatever it may be. Its conviction is that truth never can be anything else than truth; that fact can never be anything else than fact; and that no two truths or two facts in God's universe can be in hopeless and irreconcilable contradiction.
In this spirit the genuine sons of science have exhibited, what has seemed to some, a heartless indifference whether their discoveries or theories harmonized with the Scriptures or not, or affected the received opinions of Christendom on subjects pertaining to religion or morals. They have been sublimely unconcerned as to results in any such direction. They have investigated, examined, compared, collated, with long-continued and patient toil, to gather from the buried past the actual story of its departed cycles; they have not been troubled lest they should impinge on the creeds of the religious world, or compel important modifications in the lectures of learned Professors. This was no care of theirs. They discovered facts, they did not make them.
Now with all due respect for the opinions and feelings of religious people, we hesitate not to affirm that this spirit is the only true one in scientific men. Conceding, as we must, the supremacy of facts in their own sphere, and granting that, as mundane and human affairs now stand, the evidence of the senses, purged from fraud and illusion, must be held to be conclusive, we cheerfully award to scientific men the largest liberty to pursue their inquiries in matters of fact, utterly regardless of the havoc which may be thereby wrought among the traditional, beliefs of men. In no other way can science be true to herself. She is the child of induction. She can acknowledge no authority but what has been enthroned by inductive reasoning; and were she to adjust her conclusions, and garble her facts, to suit the faiths, beliefs, prejudices, or traditions of men, she would thereby falsify her inmost life, and stultify herself before the world. And in this connection we may premise that we regard as worthy of all commendation the straightforward and unembarrassed manner in which Sir Charles Lyell pursues his inquiries into the geological evidences of the antiquity of man. He could not have been unaware that he was striking a ponderous blow at one of the main traditions of Christendom; nay, that if successful in establishing his conclusions, he must revolutionize, to a large extent, the